It was one of the glorious symbols of the freewheeling, acid-laced Sixties: Ken Kesey’s psychedelic bus, with its quixotic name “Furthur” slapped on its front, a whimsical nod to its perennially unreachable destination. Furthur started life as a mundane 1939 International school bus, doggedly plying a route somewhere in Northern California. An Atherton man bought it and outfitted it as a camper for his family, and in 1964 he put it up for sale.

Kesey, the author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” bought the bus for, maybe, $1,500, and the Pranksters set to work painting it. And it was not going to be school bus yellow. As Tom Wolfe put it in his chronicle of that age, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” the bus ended up “glowing orange, green, magenta, lavender, chlorine blue, every fluorescent pastel imaginable in thousands of designs, large and small, like a cross between Fernand Leger and Dr. Strange, roaring together and vibrating off each other as if somebody had given Hieronymous Bosch fifty buckets of Day-Glo paint and a 1939 International Harvester school bus and told him to go to it.”

We’re finding out about all this from a lovely piece by Daniel Strohl on the Hemmings Daily site. Strohl goes on to report that the bus, which became one of the lumbering vehicular (some might say metaphorical) symbols of that age, ended up forlorn and abandoned in a swampy section of Kesey’s Oregon farm after it blew its engine en route to Woodstock in 1969.

Kesey died in 2001 and about four years later, his family rescued the bus from the swamp.

Now there’s a move afoot to restore the bus – there’s no precise estimate, but it could cost $1 million to get the bus back to that heady, funky shape in which it dreamed its way through the Sixties. The effort to restore the bus is being made by the non-profit Furthur Down the Road Foundation and there’s more information at FurthurDowntheRoad.org.